Happy Valentine’s Day! Are you looking for easy heart shaped food ideas to make with kids for Valentine’s Day? If so, you’ve come to the right place. We made a variety of festive heart shaped foods with our niece, Keira, and nephew, Dylan. We made heart shaped pancakes, grilled cheese and chocolates. The kids loved eating their holidays bites almost as much as making them. We are excited to share our easy heart shaped food ideas with you.
Easy Heart Shaped Food Ideas: Pancakes
While plastic food and a pretend kitchen may work for some kids, our big girl, Keira, prefers to play sous-chef in her mommy’s kitchen. In honor of Valentine’s Day, we began our weekend with heart shaped pancakes. Keira prepared the pancake batter with her favorite tools. She gathered all of the dry ingredients first.
Keira loves cracking eggs with an egg cracker. Just make sure to have kids crack the eggs in a separate bowl. That way you can remove any shells that they may have accidentally gotten into the bowl.
The final step was mixing all of the wet and dry ingredients in the KitchenAid Stand Mixer. This mixer is a must have when cooking with kids. Keira and Dylan love pouring the ingredients and turning the dial to mix them.
We used a heart shaped cookie cutter to mold the pancakes. We greased the cookie cutter and then put it on the stove. Next we added the batter to the cookie cutter and cooked the pancakes.
Pancake Tips:
- Skip pancake mix and follow Martha Stewart’s pancake recipe
- Martha’s recipe serves 2 adults so adjust accordingly
- Use butter instead of oil for better flavor
- Use a Stand Mixer or Hand Mixer to mix ingredients (you could whisk by hand but that takes longer)
- Use metal cookie cutters and spray with cooking spray or oil (plastic will MELT!)
- Scoop batter using ice cream scoop
We served our easy heart shaped pancakes with maple syrup and Martinelli’s sparkling apple cider.
Easy Heart Shaped Food Ideas: Grilled Cheese
For lunch, Keira made heart shaped grilled cheese sandwiches. She loved stamping the bread and cheddar cheese herself. Then she assembled her sandwich. We grilled the sandwiches on a Cuisinart panini press, and shortly thereafter, we enjoyed our gooey grilled cheese.
Easy Heart Shaped Food Ideas: Chocolates
We finished our Valentine’s Day celebration with homemade heart chocolates. All you need for this recipe is red candy melts and a heart shaped candy mold. You could also use white chocolate and red food coloring, but using the red candy melts is the easiest method. We used a double broiler to melt our red candy melts. Note that water and chocolate go together like oil and water. Don’t mix them unless you want thick seized chocolate.
Dylan mixed the melted chocolate until it was the right consistency. He even sampled the chocolate to make sure everyone would enjoy it.
Then we placed the melted chocolate in a heart shaped candy mold.
We placed the heart chocolates in the freezer for 30 minutes and then popped them out. For tips on using chocolate molds, check out last week’s Super Bowl post and purchase molds from a specialty baking store like Sweet Treat Supply or Amazon. These chocolates are an easy heart shaped food idea with kids.
This Valentine’s Day try one or more of these easy heart shaped food ideas. Trust us the kids will love them for breakfast, lunch or dessert. If you are feeling very festive, you can make the heart shaped pancakes, heart shaped grilled cheese and heart shaped chocolates.
The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées
This is definitely something that I would want to try with my own kid. Since Valentines is fast approaching, it would be perfect.
So cute to make heartshaped pancakes! <3
Can’t believe Valentines day is just a few weeks away.. haven’t we just celebrated christmas? thanks for the present reminder (:
Oh, I love the heart pancakes. My kids would flip for those on Valentine’s morning. I’m going to have to pick up a heart shape cutter.
Those pancakes are so cute. It seems like you guys had a great time!
This is so fun to do, especially when kids are there to help out. It not just for fun, it can also teach them to help out,sometimes. Nice blog.
What a lovely idea!!! I will surely do something like this for Valentines!
These are so cute! I will have to make these for my kids for this Valentine’s Day.
This is perfect for Valentine’s Day. These are a cute and great idea.
Aw, this brought back memories of baking with the boys. Love these ideas `
Oh. My. God. You guys are too cute!!! I love those heart shaped pancakes. Great idea with the cookie cutter! I’m stealing this idea for my kiddos breakfast this Valentines Day! Thank you:)
This was such an adorable post, it made me smile, these kids are too cute! I never thought to try pancakes in a cookie cutter, I’ll definitely have to try this!
I LOVE that heart pancake! My kids would love it.
This is such a fun idea! There are so many fun things you can make and get creative with.